Winning is supposed to loosen the shoulders, isn’t it? A couple of good results, a bit of momentum, and suddenly the football starts to flow. But it hasn’t felt like that at all lately. We’ve put three wins on the spin and somehow looked more tense, more open, and more reliant on moments than any sort of settled plan.
Truth is, it’s been individual quality getting us over the line, with the opposition helping us out through their own unforced mistakes. And yes, Eki has stood out as the one who can turn nothing into something. That’s a lovely thing to have in the side, but it can’t be the only thing holding the whole show together.
Winning masks problems, it doesn’t fix them
The worrying bit isn’t even that we’re not dazzling. You can accept a side being a bit clunky while it finds rhythm. It’s that we still get cut open far too easily. One half-decent spell from the other team, a bit of pressure, a slightly messy transition, and we look fragile. Not “we might concede from a worldie” fragile, but “one simple pass and we’re chasing shadows” fragile.
That’s what makes it hard to relax, even when you’re ahead. You don’t feel in control. You feel like you’re waiting for the next moment you have to survive.
The final 15 minutes: no calm, no control
The last quarter of the match was especially grim from a game management point of view. This is a group with players who’ve been there and done it, lads who either won us the league or came in with massive expectations on their shoulders. So you expect better decisions: slower the game when you need to, keep the ball with purpose, win fouls, make the pitch big, take the sting out of it.
Instead, it felt frantic. Like we were playing the occasion rather than the situation in front of us.
Sideways passing can’t be the whole idea
The bit that really nags is the pattern. The endless sideways circulation, the lack of tempo, the sense that we’re moving the ball without moving the opposition. Possession is fine if it’s a platform, but it can’t be the destination. And across the season so far, there’s been too little sign of an actual shift: no clear adaptation, no consistent increase in speed, no real change in how we hurt teams.
Maybe it’s by design, maybe it’s caution, maybe it’s a side still learning habits. But if the plan is to keep nudging it side to side and hoping quality bails you out, it’s a plan that will eventually run out of luck.
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